MFA video thesis screening
7-11 pm
Visual Arts Theatre
333 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
September 12
Chris Immel
The Luminiferous Æther
Marie, a theoretical physicist, searches in island seclusion for an understanding of the universal "unattainable." The natural world inexorably and wordlessly folds in around her even as she struggles to understand it through formal means.
Adrian Garcia Gomez
Changó
Angeliki Tsotsoni
Symphony of The New World
This work is made up of various non-contextualized characters that appear almost as interludes between different locations. I know almost nothing of these people. I met them for a few minutes during a short local road trip. Spontaneous storytellers, a young demented boy and the eroticism of a gypsy girl became the essential synthesis of a forgotten society in this piece.
Corinne van der Borch
Girl With Black Balloons
In the stairwell of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, Dutch filmmaker Corinne van der Borch stumbles upon an ornery elderly resident named Bettina, living in the shadows.
Over decades Bettina has surrounded herself with boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, filled with works of her art that never left her studio.
She sleeps on a lawn-chair, and dreams of her own museum, while the sediments of her life push her to the verge of eviction.
During humorous, intimate and provocative conversations, their difficult friendship gradually grows, as the filmmaker attempts to unveil the life of one of New York's last true eccentrics.
September 13
Arin Yoon
Americanism
Americanism is a documentary about the culture of education in South Korea as experienced through the eyes of the students themselves. The film focuses on the perspectives of a student living in Korea, three students attending boarding schools in the U.S. (all of whom stop filming at various stages of the filmmaking process), and my own. I sent video cameras to four students and asked them to film their lives. I gave them some instructions, mostly basic guidelines on how to film, and soon after, I received tapes back from them in the mail. Americanism is about education, but it is also about being an adolescent in a global society.
Jin Ju Lee
Observation Log
Observation Log, a video diary of my journeys last summer in Arizona and South Korea, is a record of not only looking out into the world, but also seeing into myself. It is constituted of four short videos which have different subjects but overall, are related to each other. The beauty of the object is not created in the act of photographing, rather the beauty is found with sensitive eyes answering to the revelation of being within certain objects and moments.
Antonia Leite
Mildered's Farewell
With manic sensuality, “Millred’s Farewell” weaves in and out of abstraction, disintegrating and reconstituting seamlessly in a total act of ambiguity, lusciously brushing away our rigid categories. Floating in timeless, hidden places, figures, faces and bodies reveal themselves awash in light. Textures we barely recognize hint at objects and then transform away, gathering up the reality of impermanence with a lawless combination of matter and non-matter. Dias Leite’s mountainous intimacy lulls us and then turns wrathful giving us a slight finger waving at our assumption of trajectory and anything sound and steady. Very minimal tones and sounds add to this exposition on the transient, her myth of presence. And Antonia leads us through her tale of that myth like a aesthetic Dickens’ ghost, cradling us in memory and then violating us with existence. “Mildred’s Farewell” skewers presence and absence with a visceral tactility that posits the anachronistic showdown of mind and body as a raveled earthly whole. Antonia Dias Leite questions our instincts as well as our reasoned justifications for distancing ourselves from them.
Heather Bennett
Youngshin Jang
Untitled
